My attempts to run a development build of Expo Go on Android. Report and HELP Requested.

Expo SDK
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Hello. I hope this is the right place to post this. I am looking for help from a member of the Expo development team.

I am attempting to run a development build of Expo Go on my Android device. I would like to poke around the code, learn how it works, and possibly contribute to the repo. Unfortunately I’m running into several problems, a few I have already resolved and one I am stuck on. Let me explain what I have done so far.

  1. Cloned expo repo.
  2. Installed and setup JDK OpenJDK 11, Android Studio. Installed and set to use node 16. Ran npm run setup:native
  3. Navigated to expo/home
  4. I then tried to execute npx expo run:android -d and select my physical device. The first error I encountered pertained to expo-camera . I resolved this issue by adding the maven block to android/build.gradle as described here https://github.com/expo/expo/tree/master/packages/expo-camera#installation-in-bare-react-native-projects
    I also had to run npx expo install expo-camera
  5. The next error I encountered was cannot find symbol BuildConfig , in MainApplication.java. This I fixed by adding import com.expohome.BuildConfig; to MainApplication.java. 5) Then appeared errors in MainActivity.java which I fixed by adding
import com.expohome.R
import com.expohome.BuildConfig;

to that file.

  1. After all that the app manages to build! I then press a in the console to launch on my device. Unfortunately it crashes immediately after flashing a white screen on my phone. I get a message on device with the header Something went wrong with expo-home Here is what the console shows:
› Opening on Android...
› Opening com.expohome/.MainActivity on SM_A136U

› Logs for your project will appear below. Press Ctrl+C to exit.
› Opening com.expohome/.MainActivity on SM_A136U
› Press ? │ show all commands

I am not sure how to proceed from here. Also why do I have to make so many changes to repo just to get it to build? Is this normal or is there something different about my setup or process? Perhaps this is not the normal build process for Expo Go? Any help and insights are greatly appreciated.

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